When we see “fractional people”, people who are spread across teams, the most common reason is that they’re one of a limited number of people with a specific skill. There is a real cost to having fractional people in the environment, so when we consider how we could make the overall teams better, “cross training” is often brought up as an action. Let’s hold a training session or write up some documentation so that other people can learn.
What we quickly discover is that at best, this cross-training is ineffective, and at worst it doesn’t work at all.
Often the skills we’re trying to transfer are tacit knowledge. These are things that must be learned through experience, not through reading a book or watching a video. Cross training, as it’s often done within a team, just doesn’t work with tacit knowledge.
Even with explicit knowledge, the time to learn can be long, and given that team members rarely have the skills to make good training content, it’s often ineffective. Building effective training content is a real skill in itself.
What can we do instead? What if we actually worked together on the same problem at the same time? If we paired (or mobbed) on a piece of work together? Now we are gaining experience, which is the only way we learn tacit knowledge, and are also accelerating the rate at which we pick up explicit knowledge.
When we have these fractional people who are specialists in a skill, what if we asked that they never work alone? What if they always paired or mobbed with other people?
Consider how fast we’d get to a point that they weren’t the bottleneck any more, and when they could stick with just one team.
This isn’t just theory. I’ve done this over and over with teams and the results are amazing.